The Science of Power

by Emerson, Ru

  It had been—what? How many days after Frenault’s message went overseas? Too many, he decided gloomily. Dupret had had enough time to—Well, whatever he’d done, there hadn’t been any reverberations up in Mondego; nothing at all, word or rumor, from French Jamaica. It seemed forever; hadn’t been that long, and his ribs still protested sharply whenever he took too deep a breath or rolled over the wrong way in his sleep.

  He couldn’t do anything; that was a large part of the problem, of course. He still hurt and his energy level was near rock bottom. But neither Ariadne nor Eddie would let him try anything more strenuous than a slow walk down to the nearest beach and back to their inn, once a day. There was nothing to do except send and receive letters and wires. He was going to break the bank, all those wires back to Afronsan and Jen. A guy gets spoiled back up there, all that free wire time. Something better come of all this, get that crap out of Rhadaz before it takes out more than people like Lizelle. Rotten woman, getting hooked, trying to get Aletto hooked, and then offing herself before anyone could call her on it.

  Well, it was starting to look like something would come of all those wires and all the hard work so far—the Alliance was actually cooperating, Jen and Afronsan were still wading through stacks of contracts and letters, and even the local French were helping—grudgingly in some cases, but still. Well, who can blame ‘em? Dupret’s noble, after all. Bet they’d rather wash the dirty laundry back home, quietly and out of sight.

  Fortunately, his second meeting with Frenault had been extremely brief—the man could as well have sent him a message that the investigation team would expect all four of them this morning. Even more good luck, he didn’t have to handle Frenault alone this time—though the two younger sons of high French noblemen who’d come on the steamship Auguste Lyonne spoke scarcely more English than Frenault; they were barely aware where Rhadaz might be located and of course understood none of its language. Chris’s French was just passable, but they had brought their own translator—along with three secretaries, two of whom were presently busy copying down everything anyone in the room said—and an aged King’s Notary who sat by the window, his hands resting on the long case that would carry the sworn testimony back to the Council, once it had been stamped, sealed, and done to in whatever other fashion that would make it official. The questions themselves—picky, Chris thought tiredly. They wanted to know everything, minute by minute. Jen used to do this kinda thing for a living? Pass! His own testimony had taken well over two hours, with first dark, chubby little Joulon and then the even darker, neatly bearded Giraut asking the questions. They’d spent next to no time on Dija, but of course, she’d seen and heard almost nothing. Eddie had seen Albione, Albione’s men, overheard the talk when they boarded the Maborre. But both of them had been questioned briefly and early on, had signed where told to sign, repeated the oath in French, and left together. Hours earlier.

  Ariadne—he didn’t think they’d ever finish with Ariadne. Frenault paced the room, occasionally muttering something under his breath: repeating a question or an answer to himself, or simply mumbling. Mostly staring down his long, thin nose or playing with his shiny, rose-colored cuffs or his rings. Chris couldn’t make out most of what he said, and didn’t really care. The others ignored him, too, unless one or another of them wanted something—like tea.

  “But you do definitely know, madame, that he was engaged in the production of drug-tainted brandies, and for certain with the aid of the man Sorionne?” Joulon asked—for perhaps the fifth time. Ariadne sipped pale amber tea, set the thin cup back on its ornate legged tray, and nodded. Her eyes were dark with irritation, though it didn’t show in her voice; she even managed a faint smile for the man as she patiently reiterated the pertinent conversations she’d overheard at various times. Including the one between Dupret and Maurice outside her locked bedroom door, that last night in Philippe-sur-Mer.

  Chris sipped his own tea. Really dislike this stuff. One of those herby things Mom would drink. I’d still kill for a cold Coke. Or even coffee. Probably lucky the ambassador had offered as much as he had.

  It was done, finally; late-afternoon sun came through tall windows to lay across the long, handwritten sheets of thick, laid paper. The Notary sealed both in blue-and-gold wax; Chris signed, Ariadne signed; the two noblemen countersigned across the bottoms and Chris watched as the Notary rolled everything together and fitted it into the narrow case, then sealed the case itself and prepared wax for each of the other two men to complete the outer seal. Ariadne let Chris pull her to her feet; the two noblemen rose with her.

  Giraut bowed over her fingers. “Madame, our regrets and those of your uncle the Due for these unpleasantries.”

  “Merci.” She inclined her head. Joulon opened his square leather folder and drew out a thick envelope, which he handed to her.

  “From your uncle. We shall remain in Mondego until tomorrow evening, if you wish to send a reply to him with us.”

  Ariadne handed Chris the envelope; he slid it into the deep pocket of his jacket. “You go where—first to Philippe-sur-Mer?”

  “No, madame. First the city New Lisbon; we have word Lord Albione was seen there, two days ago. Better to take both men back to France at once; by your words and yours, M. Cray, Lord Albione is deep in M. Dupret’s confidences.” Giraut rubbed a neat little blue-black beard with one small hand, kissed the air just above Ariadne’s fingers. “Madame—”

  Ariadne brought her chin up. “We go with you.” The two men exchanged startled looks; Frenault mumbled something. “It is our right, mine and Chris’s, by French law, to confront the man as he is arrested and say to him the paper you have is my own word, and is sworn truth, is that not so?”

  “Well, yes—” Giraut began doubtfully.

  “And if this is done, there is no cause he or I must appear at that man’s trial?”

  “That’s so—”

  Chris touched Ariadne’s wrist, gestured with his head. “Just a moment—excuse us, if you don’t mind?” He drew her several paces away, then whispered, “Are you nuts?”

  “I?” She spread her arms in a broad shrug; her eyes were black. “You think I let matters go so simply? To sit here and talk and talk—and then-we walk away and let these men do the filth—do the dirty work, you call it? I see him taken, Chris, this is important to me. And those men who are his agents around the island—there, at least, I know every man who is Henri Dupret’s. They take all such men, not simply Henri Dupret and Albione.” She glared up at him; he glared back, shook his head. “I must see this thing finished, Chris. I must!”

  “Both of us swore we’d stay away from the man after this last little fiasco.” She folded her arms, and simply looked at him; his temper went. “Ariadne, damnit! Remember how pissed—how mad you got up in Sikkre, when you thought I was coming back down here to get your old man?”

  “Because that was alone, you and Eddie, and without me,” she snapped back. “This—they have a steamship, with men and guns, and even my father and all his hired men will count for nothing against them!”

  “Yeah. And what if Dupret decides he wants to take us out and doesn’t care if they kill him for it?”

  “You,” she whispered icily, “do not have to go with me!”

  “Oh, yeah?” He scowled at her. “What about, ‘I do not leave you, ever again in this life?’ I thought you meant that!”

  She glanced beyond him. “Hush,” she said in a low, sharp voice. “They come.”

  “Oh, hell,” Chris muttered, then bit his lip.

  Ariadne put on a smile for them that somehow managed to take the heat out of her eyes. “You will take me to Philippe-sur-Mer?” she asked in crisp French.

  Joulon eyed Giraut, who nodded. “Madame, of course, if you insist upon it, but—”

  “Good.”

  Chris sighed heavily. “All right, lady, you win! Both of us,” he told Giraut.

  Joulon spread his hands in a broad shrug. “It is reasonably safe, M. Cray—given the m
an himself, I make no guarantees, but you understand this, of course.”

  “Don’t I, though,” Chris mumbled.

  “And,” Giraut put in neatly, “of course, it saves you the journey to Paris, when the man is brought to trial.”

  Chris glanced at the elaborately sealed tube in the Notary’s hands. “All that—and we’d still have to be there?”

  “Well—because of his rank, you understand. A man of the Due’s blood can challenge the authenticity of such papers and testimony, and then—”

  “Yeah. And like he wouldn’t,” Chris mumbled in English. “Yeah, okay. Fine. We’ll do it your way, Ariadne. I swear, though, if something happens to you—”

  “Nothing bad happens,” she said firmly. “Only to Henri Dupret and those men on French Jamaica who deal with him in Zero.” Chris sighed resignedly, then squared his shoulders and shook hands with Joulon and Giraut.

  Ariadne stepped back to draw on gloves. Your face, she ordered herself. That it shows nothing, except possibly satisfaction for winning the argument against three stubborn males. If they suspected what she planned—or even worse, if Chris did! Nothing must interfere, whatever else happens, from here to there, or afterward. I see him, to his face. One—last—time. And then—Chris turned to take her arm; he still looked very put out; and he only knew, as he himself would say, the half of it. Ariadne set the thought firmly aside, laid her hand atop Chris’s, and let him walk her from the room.

  He was quiet all the way back to the inn; Ariadne glanced at him now and again, but his eyes were on the people around them, moving constantly. Leave him be, she decided. He clearly still didn’t feel safe here; it was fair, she didn’t herself. She wouldn’t distract him with talk. She glanced at his face again as they entered the inn; it was drawn, his lips clamped firmly together, but he didn’t look angry. Once they were inside the main room, she caught hold of his wrist, drawing him to a halt. “How long since you took the healer’s powders?” she asked quietly.

  Chris shrugged; a frown quirked his forehead. “Don’t know. Eddie gave them to me.”

  “Those?” She shook her head. “But that was—it has been hours, before breakfast! Have you more, in the box up there?”

  “Maybe one,” he began. Ariadne swore under her breath and strode over to the high counter, where a young woman leaned on her elbows. She was talking to one of the messengers; both looked very bored.

  “Boy,” she said as she drew the small embroidered coin bag from her pocket. “Two sous extra for you if you go to Marie Elorra, in the Street of Tall Cane and bring back at once for M. Cray a new box of powders. She will know what to send.” The boy caught the coins deftly and sprinted for the door, nearly colliding with Chris as he ran out. Ariadne went quickly up the stairs; Chris, mumbling under his breath and holding on to the wall with one hand, came right behind her.

  Dija pulled the door open and sighed with relief. “Ah, madame! I thought I heard your footsteps. So many hours—but you are here, all is well.” Her French was even better than his own, Chris thought tiredly, and she’d been at it only a few short weeks. Ari’s right; I don’t have that kind of gift for languages. Then again, Dija and Ariadne spoke nothing else between them. And he could manage basic communication in most of the European tongues, as well as Incan and Cantonese. Not so bad. Depends on what you need. He drew a deep breath, winced, and set his hand against his side.

  Ariadne began unpinning her hat as soon as she passed the doorway, and tossed it onto the bed. Dija made a vexed little noise, scooped up the hat, and settled her mistress on the upright chair by the window so she could shove dislodged pins into the elaborate coil of braids beginning to slip down the base of her neck. “All those words,” Ariadne droned. “His and then mine, and then all the meaningless pleasantries. Nothing more.” She wasn’t telling Dija about the trip back via French Jamaica, Chris noticed. Just as well; Dija’s nightmares had brought them all awake, the first two nights in this inn. What the girl didn’t know couldn’t hurt anyone, just now.

  “So long you were gone, though! You must be hungry.”

  “We were given cakes and tea—sweet things only, and not enough of either, actually,” Ariadne admitted. Dija stopped pinning, leaned forward to eye her anxiously. “It is fine, I am fine—we both are. They wish to make certain of my uncle, to skewer him with words. I wanted to be sure they could do this.”

  “Only with words, huh?” Chris asked. Ariadne laid a hand on Dija’s to restrain the hairpins, turned to face him.

  “I left the knife between his feet outside Philippe-sur-Mer, if you remember,” she said flatly. “I have had no time to purchase another such knife.”

  “I know you haven’t. And let’s keep it that way for now. You know you’re gonna get pissed when you see the dude, and I bet your uncle Philippe’s men won’t be thrilled if you gut the guy before they can interrogate him. And there’s the small matter of a trial?”

  “Perhaps—or perhaps not. Uncle Philippe might like for all this dirt with Henri and his papa does not come public.”

  “Well, let’s not find out, all right?” Chris put in sourly. Ariadne shrugged. Chris subsided on the bed, cautiously, one hand against his side. “In any case, I’ll bet Henri will hate being back in Paris because he’s on trial for dealing drugs more than anything anyone could do to him.” He laid back flat with a faint sigh. “Dija, Eddie didn’t really leave you alone, did he?”

  “I am all right in these rooms. And there was a wire—he went somewhere to get it,” Dija said. She tucked two more long hairpins between her lips and went back to fussing with Ariadne’s hair.

  Chris closed his eyes. “Oh. You opened the door before we could knock or say anything, though. That’s dangerous, remember?” Silence. “Keep it in mind, please. Vey’ll kill me and Eddie both if you get mangled by someone looking for any of the rest of us.” He let out his breath in a gust. “Ariadne, I am not taking more of those powders, they make me dizzy.”

  “They make the ribs heal faster, she said so, remember?”

  “It’s my ribs that’re messed up, not my brain, all right?”

  “And it will remain your ribs unless you take the powders,” Ariadne replied sharply. She set Dija’s hand aside when the maid would have shoved another pin into her hair, got to her feet, and went over to sit at the edge of Chris’s bed. Chris opened his eyes, closed them again as she laid the back of one small, cool hand against his brow. “You are still too warm, and I hear you at night when you try to move, and you think we are all asleep. The powders—a little of dizzy is nothing, compared to days and more days like this.”

  “You’re trying to distract me,” Chris mumbled. Ariadne shook her head, laid the hand across his lips when he tried to say more.

  “I try to make you better. I cannot myself; my mother’s craft is not in me, you know this. I do what else I can, so you do not hurt an hour longer than you must.”

  Chris sighed and captured her hand. “Look—I’m sorry, I’m just a lousy patient, all right? It—I don’t do sick well at all, never did, you can ask Jen. Honestly, Ari, I’m not yelling at you—”

  “As you did in M. Frenault’s chamber?” she asked dryly.

  He sighed, very heavily. “Ariadne, come on, be reasonable, what you asked them for is too much, all right? You don’t want to see that man again! I sure as hell don’t want to see him again! And I—all right, I didn’t know about the thing where he could make us show up in Paris for his trial.” He considered this, sighed again, very faintly. “And he’d probably have arranged for someone like Albione to pull us off whatever ship we took there, and dump us in the middle of the ocean.”

  “No. As you say, we do not do things that way,” Ariadne said. She stared at the wall over his head, eyes black and her mouth tight. She sat like that for a moment, finally shook her head; Chris wondered what she’d been thinking about. “We—if we are upon the Auguste Lyonne, in the company of all those who sail her and serve as soldier upon her, we are safe. He is
brought, we speak the oath before him and in the presence of the sworn King’s Notary—why, it is over, fini, and we go our own way and create a real life between us—while he goes into the bowels of that ship on his way to a dungeon cell in Paris.” She scowled at her hands. “And his spies. And serve every one of them properly, too.”

  “Right. Me, too.” His voice was sharp with sarcasm, but when she looked at him, his eyes were closed once more; lips compressed. Maurice died much too quickly, she thought in a sudden fury and got up from the bed. The bedroom, unlike the tiny sitting adjoining it, was fairly large—of course, it had to be, to hold three big beds, two heavy cabinets for garments, and linen chests at the end of each bed. There were two many-paned windows, one facing the main street, the other overhanging the tile-roofed portico.

  No one she knew, out in either direction—no Eddie, coming back from the telegraph office, no boy returning with the healer’s powders. But a moment later, she heard steps outside the door, and Edrith came in, a thick wad of paper clutched in one hand, a bundle in the other. “One of the messengers was on his way with this for the lady.” He held it out; Ariadne took it and broke the package open, shook one of the small black folds of paper free, and dumped it in Chris’s cup.

  Behind her, Chris caught his breath sharply as he tried to sit up. She set her teeth together hard, concentrated on readying the cup, and brought it across as Edrith sat on the far side of Chris’s bed and held out the thick bundle. Chris eyed him warily. Edrith’s eyes were dancing and he was having a hard time not laughing aloud. “What’s so funny?” He shook his head as Ariadne held out the cup. “Ariadne, I am not drinking that!”